When I saw Dancer In The Dark in 2000, I had to run out of the theatre before the credits started because I was sobbing so loudly. I spent the last five minutes of the film huddled against the theatre’s façade, desperately trying to pull it together. When I saw Drag Me To Hell a few months ago, I stayed for the credits and strolled out with a shit-eating grin, practically skipping down the street. My markedly different responses might suggest a polar opposition between the two films, or vastly different narrative approaches employed by the films’ directors - Lars Von Trier and Sam Raimi, respectively. Yet, both anecdotes reflect on each filmmakers’ capacity to emotionally affect their audience. What’s more, the narrative threads of these two films actually bear a bizarre likeness to one another.

Consider this, admittedly reductive, summary of Drag Me To Hell:

A young woman attempts to erase her past in order to carve out a better life for herself in capitalist America, but her self-denial ultimately backfires, ending in horrific consequences.

It could easily be a summary of Dogville, and, to a lesser extent, Dancer In The Dark.

Lars von Trier’s films present themselves as acutely political parables and unflinching investigations of human nature. Sadly (or happily, perhaps?), they are neither. At their essence, they qualify as emotional pornography, solely aimed at creating an intense emotional reaction from whoever is unfortunate enough to be watching them. Lars von Trier wants you to feel like shit. In Dogville, Breaking the Waves, and Dancer in the Dark, a naïve and misguided heroine willingly suffers all sorts of brutality (rape, hanging, jail, etc) simply for believing in the essential goodness of humanity. The violence in von Trier’s work always asserts itself as parabolic — a metaphorical disguise for modernist progress, capitalism, and, often, America as concept. Yet, he ultimately betrays these subtexts with his inescapable heavy-handedness. The metaphor always capitulates on itself, with his piety pushing its way to the center. Von Trier’s “twist-ending” will always be that he prizes his own ideology over our intellectual stimulation. It’s hard not to conclude that the power von Trier holds over his characters (to make them truly suffer) is the same power he wishes to hold over us, his audience. As New York Press critic Armond White so bluntly puts it, “Von Trier's not after a human essence, but personal glory.”